A Program Analysis Tool for Evaluating the Ada Compiler Validation Suite

The Ada Compiler Validation Capability (ACVC) is a large collection of programs used to verify that compilers conform to the Ada language standard. The maintenance of the ACVC is complicated by ongoing decisions of the Ada Rapporteur Group concerning possible gaps or ambiguities in the language definition. We describe a tool that is intended to simplify the maintenance and upgrade of the ACVC, by providing a specialized data-base front-end to the test suite. This front-end consists of a patternmatching system, based on the translator of the Ada/Ed system, and index files into the ACVC, built on primary syntactic features of Ada and on previously defined patterns. The patterns used by the system are compact fragments of Ada programs that contain the features of interest. We describe in detail the pattern language, the index files, and the user interface of the system. We expect the system to be particularly useful when the modifications to Ada that will result from the Ada9X pr..